About me

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science, Duke University

Office: 2471 CIEMAS. Lab: 217 Hudson Hall

E-mail: maria.gorlatova /at/ duke.edu

Research interests: My research focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with adding connectivity and intelligence to every device big and small — the cross-disciplinary area known as the Internet of Things. My work involves the development of architectures, algorithms, and protocols for pervasive technologies of the future. This work crosses traditional discipline boundaries and requires thinking across multiple layers of system and protocol stacks. I am particularly interested in the opportunities associated with fog and edge computing, and in breaking the barriers for technologies that enable fundamentally new deployments and experiences, such as energy harvesting and augmented reality. More about my current research.

Bio: Prior to starting my position at Duke, I was an Associate Research Scholar and an Associate Director of the EDGE Lab at Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering, where I worked with Prof. Mung Chiang. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in the Wireless and Mobile Networking Lab led by Prof. Gil Zussman. My Ph.D. dissertation was recognized with the highest departmental distinction, Jury Award for Outstanding Achievement in Communications. I earned the B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) and the M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Ottawa, Canada. Before and after my Ph.D. I worked in industry in research, development, and business strategy. After my Ph.D. I was an Engineering Program Manager at D. E. Shaw Research and a Senior Strategy Consultant at IBM Corporate Headquarters Chief Economist’s Office.

I received several awards including the 2016 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2011 ACM SenSys Best Student Demonstration Award, and the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications. I also received the Google Anita Borg USA Fellowship, Columbia University Presidential Fellowship, and top national Alexander Graham Bell Canadian Graduate Scholar (CGS) NSERC M.Sc. and Ph.D. Fellowships. I serve on Technical Program Committees of multiple conferences including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM MobiHoc, and IEEE ICNP.

Recent News and News Highlights

8/26/2019: Two demos accepted for presentation at ACM SenSys’19 in New York City, NY, in November 2019. [more information]

8/9/2019: Juan Blanco, a high school student who has been spending the summer in the lab, received the DukeRep Outstanding Trainee Award. Congratulations Juan!

7/29/2019: We are grateful for the NSF support of the Duke OIT-led Archipelago project, dedicated to the creation of next-generation on-campus SDN infrastructures. [ Award information ]

7/19/2019: Paper led by Xiaoxi Zhang from the group of Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong at CMU, titled “Towards Automated Network Management: Learning the Optimal Protocol Selection for Network Flows,” has been accepted to IEEE ICNP’19 as a short paper (19.3% acceptance rate). [Paper PDF]